Search This Blog

Celebrating Illustration, Design, Cartoon and Comic Art of the Mid-20th Century

Landscape Painting by Christopher Davis

Monday, August 08, 2011

Two weeks ago I was way up north, nearly an hour's drive above Manitoulin Island, on my summer vacation with a group of friends who are also artists. We spent a week up there at a camp in a tiny community called Whitefish Falls, painting landscapes 'en plein air.'

Pucci was not the only artist featured in those two volumes... there are also quite a few pages devoted to artwork and instruction from an artist named Christopher Davis. Since landscape painting is very much on my mind at the moment, I thought maybe I'd share some of Davis' work from those Grumbacher books with you this week.

The book explains how these paintings were achieved with a limited colour palette. I found it reassuring that our instructor up at Whitefish Falls, Richard Edwards, taught us to use exactly these same limited colour palettes when we did our paintings each day.

Over the last couple of years, I've been very inspired to watch the progress of a couple of friends, Michael Cole Manley and William Wray, both of whom have been doing some really fabulous painting - often landscapes. (I strongly encourage you to click through the links and have a look at their work!)

Both these gentlemen have given me some excellent advice about how to learn to paint landscapes. Just the other day Bill wrote about the importance of doing many small sketches before actually beginning to paint the subject, and that advice is confirmed and demonstrated beautifully by Davis in his Grumbacher lessons:

Here are a few more pieces by Davis... describing how to paint specific elements within various landscape and seascape settings.